Iraq's bomb: Blueprints and artifacts

After more than half a year of investigating Iraq's clandestine nuclear program, UN and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors found the biggest remaining piece of the puzzle: details of Iraq's effort to design and develop a nuclear explosive device. On September 22, an inspection team - the seventh sent by the UN Special Commission to uncover Iraq's weapons of mass destruction - discovered the nuclear weapons program archives at program headquarters in Baghdad. Many of the documents found there recorded Iraq's plans and progress. Less than a week earlier, Rahim Al-Kital, Iraq's ambassador to the IAEA, informed the agency's 1991 conference in Vienna that Iraq had already 'told the United Nations everything,' and that inspectors were 'guessing' about a nuclear weapons program that did not exist. But the find put an end to any doubts that Iraq's secret effort to enrich uranium was for weapons purposes. The documents showed that since 1988 or 1989 Iraq had invested heavily in facilities to develop and make nuclear weapons. By mid 1990, Iraqi scientists had made some progress in understanding how a relatively crude nuclear explosive device with a core of highly enriched uranium would work, and they had done some experiments on parts of the technology. By that time, an experimental program was under way for using shaped conventional charges to activate a nuclear explosion by uniformly compressing a uranium sphere. But on the eve of the Kuwait invasion, Iraqi experts still had many theoretical and experimental questions to answer